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The China the women leave obviously doesn't exist in the US, but it no longer exists in China either, as it was wiped out under Communism. This threw me a little and made the book seem fragmented. Likewise, while two of the daughters know each other quite well, though they don't get on, the other two daughters seemed to hardly know any of the others at all. The four women are close friends but their friendship isn't the subject of this novel and the fourth woman in particular seemed peripheral. I did sometimes get confused as to which character's story I was reading and had to refer back to the chart at the beginning fairly frequently. The stories of the mother's Chinese pasts are very engaging as are the contrasts with their own daughters' American lives. The Joy Luck Club tells the stories of four Chinese mothers who all leave different parts of China during/post WW II and before the Communist Revolution and their four daughters who are born and raised in the US. Reading Wild Swans in the interim might have helped as I was more interested in the historical Chinese background and could follow the stories better (for example I knew who the Kuomintang were, which I wouldn't have otherwise.) Second time round, many years later, I greatly enjoyed it. When this book came out first, I started it but didn't get past the first chapter. It's intricately crafted and shows how little we can really know of another person: like these mothers and daughters, we see others through our own prisms of experience and our relationship with them, not necessarily seeing the complex whole of a human being. The stories are set up as each move in a mah jong game, eventually building up to a whole that gives the reader a fuller perspective of the seven narrators' stories, and that of the newly-deceased Suyuan, despite the fact that she never speaks herself. I had to keep reminding myself that this book was written in 1989, because it didn't read like a nearly 35-year-old book. The narrative intersperses their stories with that of their American daughters, including Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. The women were from various places in China with very different backgrounds, but all met after they immigrated to San Francisco in the late 1940s. When her mother, Suyuan, dies Jing-mei "June" Woo is invited to take her place in the mah jong table in the Joy Luck Club along with her friends, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St.